Marking….and the morning person

Had a bit of an ‘A-ha’ moment this morning.
I have been trying (without a lot of success) to find time to sit and mark my IT students’ major assessment task over the last couple of weeks. Seems like every time I would sit down to get into it, my phone would ring or the email goes bing and something urgent would come up. Seems I spend most of my working day either teaching or putting out IT-related spot fires. Ah, the worry of being the IT go-to man on campus; a mantle I am happy to wear…. most of the time.

I set aside time last night to nail the last part of this marking task, only to find that once the kids had got settled in bed and I had half a moment to scratch myself I was yawning like a cavern and thinking of bed myself. So I set the alarm for 5am and turned out the light.

5 o’clock comes, out of bed I jump (sort of,) make a cup of tea and away we go. Dialled in (yes, I know – its a long story….) and was able to upload student feedback to Moodle without worrying about tying up the phone line. The brain was ticking, the keys were clicking – it is all coming together….By the time the family all got up, I was basically done! Nice one! The house was nice and quiet. I was being nice and quiet so as not to wake anyone. No distractions, other than the Ipod, and a time limit to work to. The ADD part of me had to be settled with nothing to distract me, so the job got done.

You may remember from my post in March on bodybuilding, that I am used to getting into my day early. Nothing better than lifting some heavy weights before brekky. Early mornings were also the way of things for me when I was a kid – there was me sitting on the heater at 6am waiting for the cartoons to come on. After years of guilt for never finding time to read my bible, I suddenly found 20 minutes at the start of my day – regular quiet time suddenly became a habit.

The only problem with all this is a wife who is a night-time person. She picks on me, calling me an ‘old man’ as I am getting sleepy at early hours, in bed dropping the book I am trying to read on my face. There must be a balance in there somewhere, but it strikes me that we work best when we run in our natural stream. For me, that stream seems to want to flow early, rather than late. So the alarm gets set early again tomorrow…off to the gym, or perhaps to the lappy.

A classroom without Moodle

I teach senior IT, and am faced with a session without PCs.  This means no typing, no Internet, and most troubling no Moodle.  Our Careers guys are comendeering my lab for an afternoon, so we have to move on.  To make this just a little more interesting, I will be out on PD on that day.

We had a Moodle dropout last week, (see previous post.)  Stuffed up my whole day.  At least this time I have some warning.

So what are we going to do?  If the class had PCs and Moodle but no Me, no problem.  Write up a quiz or a webquest and away they go.  Would be a dream of an extra class to pick up.  But no Moodle!

I decided, on agreeing to give up my lab, that completing a task on paper is no big deal – the kids have to do this in exams anyway, and it is a good exercise to remind them that they have tobe able to verbalise IT concepts, not just do it on a computer.  It is planning the tasks for the class that is getting me down; no previously posted resources, no scanned textbook pages, no messaging instructions, no clever web2 tools to liase with.  It will have to be a case of read this bit in your text book, now do this.  I am going to have to type up instructions and print them out!  Ughh.

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Well the session has come and gone and the kids coped without Moodle.  I guess that they slipped back into paper and pen mode a lot more easily than I did.  I hear that the students made good use of their session and worked away pretty well at the paper tasks set.

Yet, by the time the next opportunity to deal with the info came around, it seems that most of the students had manage to lose their bits of paper.  I can’t help thinking that with a PC and moodle available, students would have completed the task, saved their work and then uploaded the completed assignment for me to grade.   Perhaps the students had no idea what to do with bits of paper, as I have not done photocopying for IT for years.  Perhaps Moodle and online facilities make students less inclined to be organised with hard copies?

Food for thought.

Professional Learning & Good Teaching Practice

In response to AISV webquest on effective teaching strategies.

Having entered IT teaching only in the last few years, I have tried to seek out PD that will give me the skills I need to better student learning in the IT classrooms I work in.  As things have changed so rapidly in the online world, there have been a myriad of new things to consider.

One of my greatest strengths in utilising online technologies in teaching is my willingness to ‘play’ with new tools.  One of my colleagues once noted that I am ‘fearless’ in the classroom and will trying anything.  The same is true with web tools – I’ll try anything once.
The fallback on this is that sometimes things do fall over, or in my excitement at unleashing something new on the students, I don’t think things all the way through, and could produce a better model or a better prepared activity.
Another downside to this is losing track of the ‘big-picture’ in the culture we are trying to create within the classroom.  It is easy to lose sight of the bigger goal in favour of the exciting new tool.  One thing I can work on in regard to good practice is to always work back to the same teaching goal – better understanding of the topics at hand.

I am also a big proponent of the ‘play and learn’ approach.  Rather than standing and speaking from the front, I would prefer to build something that kids can work through or play with, and ‘learn while they are not looking.’  Unfortunately not all students are as creative as some, and prefer to hear information that they know is correct.  The other downside is that in leaving kids to work on something to get concepts into their head, they sometimes lack feedback unless this is diligently followed up.

The other concept that features in the source documents is research.  One thing that teachers struggle with in general is in finding time for the important but not urgent things that enhance effective teaching – reflection is one of these.  I have noted on many occasions that teachers have a habit of  ‘talking shop’; given a little time to consider the fruitfulness of their endeavours, they will always natter on for hours about their kids or what worked in class last week.  Formalise this with structured discussion and emprical evidence and we would have a powerful tool to see how well things are progressing in our classrooms.  But the time…….

The source document on research also points out that the public benefits when proper research and reflection is carried out.  I have sensed, as my skills in using online learning tools has grown, that it is of great importance to share this with others.  Being a PD leader in my school community, I try to drop tid-bits of clever tools to my peers whenever I can.  Yet there are probably ways of sharing new tools in a public way amongst my school community that can be effective on a wider scale.  I have considered using a public forum to drop new ideas and examples of neat things my peers are doing out there, but again it all comes down to hours in the day.

The day Moodle died….

We had a storm here last weekend which took out our WAN. We arrived to work on Monday with no Email, no Internet and NO MOODLE!

As my computer tried to log on, I wrote a list of things to do for the day. On discovering that Moodle was down, I immediately crossed off half of the things on the list to be dealt with when the WAN woke up.

My morning then consisted of things I had been putting off for a while; sort out my budget, worked on some IT tutorials the old-fashioned way (in Word grrrr,) twiddled my thumbs trying to work out how my day suddenly became so defragemented…. .

Got to thinking about how much my day now revolves around access to Moodle.  With all my curriculum being replicated online, it made it exceedingly difficult to generate anything new.  I tend to be quite anal in my teaching resources anyway, so I make a lot of new resources. I have spent much of the last week developing tutorials for Access databases.  I decided it was time to fully embrace Web2 and do this online as a wiki.  I figure that I can then update my tutes over time with new ideas or better ways of doing things.  If the kids find a better way, then heaven forbid…they could add to the resources themselves.  Teacher losing control of class….ahhhhgh   With Moodle down, all that ground to a halt. Lots of our curriculum materials are now also stored or interfaced with via Moodle.  So the storm put an end to that as well.

Happily, our technicians restored access to Moo by lunchtime, so the universe righted itself once again.  The experience made me realise how much we now rely upon online content to get through our day.  I was also reminded how much I have come to rely upon the tools and resources that Moodle does so well.

Oh Moodle!  How shall I ever live without thee?
In fact, a colleague of mine turned down a job offer in another school as they didn’t have a decent LMS.  Well not Moo anyway.

Where does teaching end and learning start?

At the beginning of the year, I did an activity with my homegroup resembling a time capsule.  I gave the students a questionnaire asking them some frivolous questions about their lives at that point, plus a place to put down 3 goals they might have for the year.  I then sealed all these up each in their own envelope, having completed the activity myself as well.  As the school year has now since drawn to a close, I followed the activity up and gave the envelopes back.  The kids responses were very interesting; most had completely forgotten about the time-capsule sheet at all.  But perhaps another time for this….

The point of this blog ; one of the goals I set for myself was to get a study score of 40+ (in the A range,) for all my Year 12 IT students.  I can tell you now, without having seen the kids exam grades, that this has not happened.  Perhaps I never really expected to have all of my students achieve this.  Yet the question then becomes, how much responsibility can we as teachers take for our students’ success?  Is it possible for any student to achieve an A for a subject, regardless of their skills at the beginning of the school year?

As mentioned, I am not sure I really expected this kind of success for my class – the standard bell curve one expects for any study would have to say that this is highly unlikely.  I guess my goal indicated my own desire to teach the students well.  If I then did the best job I could, should I have expected every kid to achieve?

The old adage “you can lead a horse to water…” seems to ring true here.  You can plan a myriad of brilliant activities, all stunningly well-prepared, to have the students stare glumly at you wondering what you are on about.  It seems quite obvious that at some point, students must choose to interact positively with the material put before them.

However, over the years, I have been a wide-scale exponent of the multiple-intelligence mode of delivery, designing a range of activities that should somehow connect with a student’s natural tendencies and preferred modes of outputting their thoughts.  Is this teaching students by stealth?  Almost catching their brains unawares by sneakily finding the way that they think best?

I guess at the end of the day, even in this scenario the student must choose to do their best with the activities presented before them, but being a competent teacher is a HUGE responsibility; one that too many take too lightly.  We can never force a student to perform beyond their abilities, but providing activities that will stretch them is the mightiest of challenges.